[OSM-dev] A new take on the "mutable" idea

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Matt Amos wrote:
> on the other hand, what's a good reason? aren't the vast majority of
> edits made for a good reason, i.e: to improve the data?

Improve according to what the person editing it thinks - yes. For 
example, and sorry for being pessimistic, I believe that a lot of OSM 
contributors would be perfectly capable to insert a few nodes into an 
administrative border and move them around just to make the line look 
less jagged on the map - "improve" it, as they wold say.

If their editor would inform them that they are editing the 
administrative border as copied from some official publication, then 
they still *could* edit the border if they e.g. had information about 
said official publication being wrong or outdated, but they would likely 
refrain from editing it otherwise. Which I'd find desirable.

>> Of course it would make sense (and not render the system useless!) to
>> implement the scheme in editors and have the editor display a pop-up note
>> saying something like "the previous editor of this item has specially
>> flagged this item <list source tag> <list changeset comment> <....>, do you
>> want to upload your change anyway?".
> 
> i think it would make even more sense if said editor could sign up on
> some server, flag his or her "special" elements there and get emails
> or an RSS feed of the changes.

That's not the same - such a feed would only allow you to do ex-post 
issue resolution ("dear user XY, you have edited an administrative 
border that I copied from official documentation, are you sure you knew 
what you were doing, because otherwise I might be tempted to revert...").

> is it better to try and prevent people editing, or give editors the
> tools to monitor areas they care about?

I think we are, and should be, moving slowly towards better conservation 
of value. We're still pretty anarchistic with every edit being given the 
same status, whether made by a newbie or an old mapper, by someone with 
a 4-year-old e-trex or someone with a state-of-the-art high-accuracy 
GPS, and so on.

I firmly believe that everyone should have the *right* to edit 
everything if they so wish, but I also want everyone to have the best 
possible information about the existing data when he edits it; that 
would (ideally) also include warnings about overwriting potentially 
reliable/high-precision data with something that is likely to be of 
lesser quality. Warnings only, because it might not be, but at least let 
people know if they want to.

So, in the long run we have to (a) let the mapper know exactly what he 
is doing, and (b) give the users a chance to determine themselves whom 
they want to trust. My idea was a step in that direction. I don't mind 
if we decide to ignore this for another year or two, but it is 
absolutely clear to me that these things will come, in one way or the 
other, and a good monitoring/notification system solves only a small 
part of this. (And layers may be an interesting concept but they don't 
either.)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"